


The Moral Tone

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Blackmail, Diary/Journal, Epistolary, Homophobia, Invasion of Privacy, M/M, Minor Canonical Character(s), Persecution, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Teacher-Student Relationship, Transcript Format
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 06:04:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5856979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why Mr Stuart left, and how Jeepers got his job.</p><p>*</p><p>Content note: suicidal thoughts and planning, suicide attempt, disability resulting from same, blackmail, homophobia, homophobic persecution, a teacher/former student pairing (relationship doesn't begin until after the student leaves school).</p><p>*</p><p>To oonaseckar's prompt: Mr Stuart, 'at second hand'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Moral Tone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oonaseckar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/gifts).



WILLIS: Hello, I’m Chris Willis, and I’d like to welcome you to ‘The Fertile Fact’, the monthly podcast of the Centre for Life-Writing at the University of Streweminster. Taking its title from Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘The Art of Biography’, this series explores issues related to the study of autobiography, memoirs, letters, diaries, journals, oral testimony, and eye-witness accounts. Today my colleague Pamela L. Marlow is here with me to talk about a remarkable diary that’s held in our archives, and which she’s been working with as part of her research on life-writing by women in the medical and caring professions during the interwar years. So, Pam, can you tell us a bit about Pauline Mansel?

MARLOW: Thanks, Chris. Well, OK, where to start? She was born in 1905, in Wem, Shropshire. Her father was a solicitor: a fairly comfortable, sober, middle-class background. Her mother was very active in various forms of war-work during the First World War, and that seems to have inspired Pauline to an interest in nursing. She had a brother, Colin, five years younger, of whom I think she was actually very fond, but he seems to have been a charming, rather irresponsible character, a bit of a wastrel. Pauline was absolutely the opposite, very practical and grounded, so her references to him often have a rather exasperated quality. But she supported him emotionally through a divorce which scandalised and threatened to estrange him from their parents… 

OK, well. Her diaries begin in her last year at school, where she seems to have been an obvious choice for Head Girl, and continue into her training at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. She was hard-working and competent, and she seems to have coped well with the gruelling hours, but she found the strict discipline of hospital life, especially the prim and prudish—very sexist—restrictions imposed on nurses’ social lives and free time, hard to take. Unfortunately, probably because she was so busy, the diaries get pretty telegraphic at this point, lots of initials and abbreviations, long gaps and then a resumption without any explanation of what’s gone on in between. There are some very funny anecdotes, though, including one about nearly being caught in bed with another nurse by the Home Sister—it’s a bit hard to tell if that was an innocent joke or something more, certainly she never married, though there are records of dates with men, even perhaps a couple of short-lived affairs, in the diaries as well, anyway, whatever it was, they got away with it. 

After she qualified, she got a hospital job, but then her own health failed—rheumatic fever—and the diaries cease altogether for two years; glancing later references suggest she was forbidden to write or do all but the lightest reading. She made a full recovery, but fearing another collapse, seems to have decided to take on some less strenuous work, and in 1931 accepted a post as Matron at a minor public school in Devon. The masters seemed to believe in being tough on their charges, and very few of the boys were ever allowed anywhere near the sick bay. So Pauline had ample time on her hands—and though she was sometimes bored and frustrated, she got on well with the boys—she was a great cricket fan, which helped—and the internal politics of institutions were always something that interested her. You can see that in the hospital diary too, but now she’s got the leisure to record it all, and what we get is this fascinating portrait of a public school in the early 30s, from someone who has access to all its levels, and often to some quite intimate and private details about masters and boys—but is still sort of detached, a bit of an outsider because of the uncertain social position of Matrons, who came from quite a wide variety of backgrounds, and of course because of her gender. The Head, and a couple of the housemasters, were married, and there’s the housekeeper and some female service staff, but essentially, she’s very often the only woman in the room, as it were. She seems to have thrived in all-male company, though there are lots of caustic reflections on unexamined privilege, too. 

WILLIS: And so the snippet you’re going to read for us is from that bit of the diary… 

MARLOW: Yes—so, yeah, this is from her second year in the school. A popular housemaster had been injured in a climbing accident, and when he subsequently resigned his post, his temporary replacement was given the job permanently. And—as often, with such appointments, it turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Well, anyway, in Pauline’s own words: 

> 25th October: MJ accosted me again on the subject of Dormitory Hygiene. As on the last couple of occasions, I gave my sturdiest impersonation of a decent, clean-limbed, entirely mindless ex-High School girl and pretended he meant precautions against an outbreak of gastro-enteritis. I longed to say, in a crisp and impersonal Ward Sister manner, something such as ‘current medical opinion holds that masturbation is normal in the adolescent male and quite harmless; on the contrary, suppression of the natural urge to sexual experiment and release is likely to have morbid effects,’ but satisfying as that would be, I sense it would be unwise to make an outright enemy of him. But it can’t go on: he must be brought to understand that I am no informer. And if he has tried me he has probably made similar attempts upon Mrs B., who has the resources to resist him, and the maids, who do not. The boys, for their part, detest him; HS was held in such affection that I daresay his successor would feel their resentment regardless, but the prevailing mood is _oh, what a falling off was there_! and it is justified. A covert sort of war is already engaged between MJ and the Head of S—’s, upon whom he piles drudgery in the hope of breaking him: the boy is working for Cambridge, it is as unjust as it is foolish. As things are, S—’s is a powder magazine: the smallest thing might provoke pitched and open battle, and while there is little doubt who will have the better of it in the short term, I shouldn’t care to bet on who’ll prevail in the end game.  
> 

And a couple of days later, she’s proved right: 

> 29th October: Well, I am a veritable oracle, but I have to say I didn’t expect it so soon, nor quite the matter of contention. _Religion_ , in this godless year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty two, whoever would have thought it? MJ is a b.f., thinking he could impose a Victorian revivalism on the merry little modern heathens: trying to compel them to ‘volunteer’ in the Mission? You’d think the man _wanted_ to engineer a full-scale rebellion, and perhaps he did. There’s a fairly fine line between strategic genius and imbecility, and pretty often you can only see which is which after the event, but this surely falls soundly into the latter category. And as for the boy, if he said even half of what is attributed to him, he is Demosthenes and Oscar Wilde new born. I believe this one: apparently MJ enquired if he considered himself a Christian, and he said, ‘christened and confirmed’, and MJ asked why then he should have any objection to participating in the Mission activities, when he had none to chapel or Sunday church, and he replied, ‘I think the distinction between εὐσέβεια and evangelism should be tolerably obvious to a scholar of Divinity,’ at which MJ is supposed to have gone off like a rocket, which must have been very satisfying. (The boy practises his closed face on Atlantic trawler skippers in the vac. He is a _piece of work altogether and no mistake_ , as old Sister Crotty would have said.) Curious that he used the Greek, he’s on the science side, but the association would be with _pius Aeneas_ , I suppose, of whom they’ve all had enough for twenty lifetimes.

WILLIS: The Greek’s, well, Greek to me, though I kind of get a idea of it from context? 

MARLOW: Eusebia—I think in this case it's, um, it’s reverence, right conduct with regard to the gods, piety in the sense of making a respectful show for the sake of a well-ordered society. Not incompatible with faith, but not necessarily implying deep personal belief either. 

WILLIS: Oh—right. So it’s perhaps exploiting the tension between respect for the classics and Christianity in the public school code? To assert a sort of noble paganism that’s actually—anti-Christian? 

MARLOW: Something like that. 

WILLIS: Pretty formidable in an eighteen-year-old boy—who sounds like he was physically tough as well—working on a trawler in the holidays? 

MARLOW: Well, it’s the _Thirties_. [laughs] But yeah, I wouldn’t say every public schoolboy socialist followed through to that extent. He comes over as an exemplary product of the system, doesn’t he? Ironically enough. 

WILLIS: Reminds me of someone I used to know. Anyway, go on. 

MARLOW: 

> And on top of it all I had to dab witch-hazel all over a fourth-former who’d sustained a suspected broken nose (it wasn’t) in defence of his rosary. The little twirp’s not even R.C., I checked.

WILLIS: It sounds like she was enjoying the fracas— 

MARLOW: Oh, definitely. I think she was very bored. But it becomes clear quite quickly that MJ isn’t just a stuffy schoolmaster, but a really decidedly malignant personality, and in fact, a bit later on he provokes Pauline’s resignation. Shall I read that bit? 

WILLIS: Go ahead. 

MARLOW: 

> 3rd November: Received a letter from HS, of all people—

WILLIS: That’s the old housemaster, right? 

MARLOW: Yeah, so—

> 3rd November: Received a letter from HS, of all people. Considerably dismayed; I really have no idea what to do, except perhaps put a Yale on. My first impulse was to burn it, but he did not ask me to do so, and though the matter is concluded, not quite for the worst, but certainly not for the best either, I sense it might be rash to dispose of this evidence just yet. 

And the letter is clipped into the diary— 

WILLIS: Fantastic— 

MARLOW: Yes, an archivist’s curse on those honourable people who conscientiously destroy sensitive correspondence—[laughter]—so, here it is. It’s written on hotel writing-paper, Hotel de la Cité, Carcassonne, and dated 25th October. 

> Dear Miss Mansel, 
> 
> As you see, I am completing my convalescence abroad. It is very nice, the town gleams. I am barricaded into a half-empty hotel, working up some of my climbing journals into continuous prose, adding anecdotes and fourth-form jokes. The rest of the trade looked longingly upon the success of Samuel Randall’s book last year (have you read it? dustier and more pedantic than I would have expected, not like my impression of the man, though I’ve only met him once) and, anyway, someone seems to have mentioned me to an interested house, so that’s all worked out reasonably well. 

WILLIS: Can we identify him from that?

MARLOW: Still working on it: there are a handful of books it might have been, none published under a name with the initials HS, so he's likely to have used a pseudonym. Understandably not too keen on publicity, as we'll see:

> I’m afraid the main subject of this letter is less happy, and I hesitated for some time before writing it. There could, I thought, be no use in raking over a painful and humiliating episode which is now, I hope, over and done with. But on the other hand, it ended in a victory for what I cannot help thinking of as _evil_ (this signifies, I think, a propensity to melodrama which bodes well for my career in station-bookstall literature). I remember with great fondness our talks over coffee—why could no one else in that school make drinkable coffee?—and reflect that you are the only person there whom I can even think of trusting with this dismal history. I hope it may be of some use to you in negotiating collegial politics.
> 
> Three years ago I fell in love. My object belonged to that class of people upon whom—in addition to the prohibitions of the criminal law—there falls the very strictest professional taboo. In the midst of considerable distress and self-disgust, I had the consolation that I had only to restrain myself for a term and a half before the temptation should be placed out of my way entirely. But about a year later, I happened to meet with the young person at a party in Cambridge. My feelings were unchanged, and to my delight I found them warmly reciprocated. We began an affair. 
> 
> I am a sentimental fool, and could not bear to destroy my friend’s correspondence, which was beautifully composed, passionate with youth’s first experience of intellectual and amorous companionship, and replete with accounts of our failures to ascend the ladder of love to the transcendent point recommended to Sokrates by Diotima. The letters were a comfort to me during our necessarily extended periods of separation; I kept them in my study desk, under lock and key, but of the sort that is vulnerable to patience and a hairpin. I trusted chiefly in the idea that an Englishman’s privacy is held sacred by his fellows. I shall never do that again. 
> 
> One day I found some of the letters missing. I was frantic with worry; I had no idea who might have taken them, for many people pass through a housemaster's study, and was terrified that they may have fallen into the hands of a pupil. This terror was dispelled and succeeded when the first demand arrived. Anonymous, of course, and with the hand assiduously but pointlessly disguised, for there could be no doubt from whom it came. It was not for money. Instead it required my support in resisting a change to admissions procedure that I had hitherto heartily approved. I had, of course, given blackmail the consideration proper to Thirty-One, but the circumstances I had pictured were the sordid and commonplace ones that I fondly imagined I could avoid by choosing my friends carefully, and which threaten only the victim, not one he would at all costs protect from the smallest insult. Having this trite idea of the mechanics of extortion, I had always regarded with contempt those unhappy creatures who held themselves so cheap as to capitulate to it. Now I joined them. I don’t know how much common-room chatter reaches your ears, but I daresay you remember the surprise my apparent change of heart occasioned, and that if you have not guessed the identity of my tormentor hitherto, this will serve to acquaint you without any need to name him. 

WILLIS: And so it’s sort of pretty strongly implied that this is the man Pauline calls MJ? 

MARLOW: Yes, it does look like it. He continues: 

> More demands came, all concerning the administration of the House and School, always requiring some compromise of my principles, but never asking me to commit definite misconduct. Sometimes the enforced course of action was to the blackmailer’s advantage, but just as often it was something in which he had no conceivable personal interest. These red herrings served as a kind of insurance against someone else noticing a pattern, no doubt, but I think he simply enjoyed seeing a man who had always evinced considerable self-respect and independence of thought—I confess, perhaps to the point of arrogance—forced to follow his direction in petty matters, the more trivial the better—do you see what I mean by evil? Though perhaps the more precise term is ὕβρις, in its Greek sense, not its English.

WILLIS: This is fascinating, but what does he mean by that? 

MARLOW: Hubris? In general, a moral outrage. Here, I think, sort of—victimisation of someone purely for personal gratification? There’s a sexual connotation to it in some ancient Greek sources too, so he’s saying that his blackmailer was really getting off on his humiliation. 

WILLIS: Gosh. Pretty nasty character, then. Go on. 

MARLOW: 

> Soon I perceived that the only course open to me was resignation of my post, which would impoverish me until I could find another, because I had, and have, no private income. Somehow the blackmailer got wind of it—perhaps he just guessed—and anticipated me, writing that he would expose both me and my friend if I gave notice. Had the threat been made against me alone, I should have defied him and accepted my fate, but the letters incriminated their writer to an even greater extent than they did me, and I bore a great share of the responsibility for the peril my friend was in. In turmoil and despair, I concluded that were I to be put out of the picture, the danger too would be ended: the blackmailer had no interest in financial gain; his perverse pleasure lay in being present to see me writhe and double back upon my convictions; he had no animus against my friend. Anxiety and fear do strange things to the ratiocinative process.
> 
> I determined upon a half-term weekend for which I had leave, and selected a spot in the Quantocks, adequately remote for my purpose. The climb was sufficiently tricky that it would be plausible that an experienced climber should get into difficulties, and I had done it often enough to know at what point that should be. 
> 
> In the end, I made a lamentable bungle of it. I daresay you know from your work with what dumb resource the primeval beasts in which our comparatively advanced brains find lodging cling to life. I had reached the place at which I must loose my grip; I did so, and that animal, with a pristine alacrity that my mind could not hope to overtake, found a hold, the existence of which I did not remember. My tardy apprehensions then had time to catch up with the body hanging there in space, and it occurred to me against whom I was committing a crime. The thought of dying in the course of such an atrocity gave me a strength that, ravelled out, might have sustained me a month, and I pulled myself up and climbed on. I damaged the tendons in my arm so doing; I still, in the end of all, fell. But when I did it was to a portion of higher ground that did not mean immediate death. I still might have lain there for days and died, eventually, of thirst and exposure. I will say nothing of my thoughts in the hours before I was found by two young people, brother and sister, who had been out all day, searching for their father’s errant passager hawk. They weren't edifying thoughts. 
> 
> You know the rest, more or less. When I was well enough to receive visitors I told my beloved G— what had happened, and received in reply a simple promise to stand by me whatever the consequences. Such courage in support of my folly and timidity was humbling beyond all words. But in the end, there was no need of it. The letters were returned to me along with a typed assurance that copies had not been made. I do not trust this entirely, but it seems that the cat has had his sport with this maimed mouse and abandoned him. I fear he will not hesitate to seek other prey, and if there is any way you can alert or protect his next mark, I beg you take it. I do not propose any amateur psychology; the thought of delving into that man’s mind sickens me. But his lack of pecuniary motivation or even regard to his own advancement (though that he has secured, I do not think it was his primary object) makes him more dangerous than someone with a mundane rationale. 
> 
> When G— has completed Part II of the Tripos we hope to settle here in the Languedoc. The climate is mostly kind to one who has a brisk surgeon’s assurance that he will like as not (to use my grandmother’s Scotch verb) _hirple_ to his grave in recognition of his cowardice and another’s cruelty, and there is something of a tradition in the country of sheltering heretics. Some days it is a strain to write about a pursuit in which I will never again engage, and on others it is an unexpected solace. Believe me, I am no Doctor Pangloss, but we do not live in the very worst of all possible worlds. 
> 
> Yours ever, 
> 
> H— S— 

WILLIS: What a heartbreaking story. Do we know what happened next? 

MARLOW: Well, Pauline seems to have turned over various courses of action in her mind, but concluded that there was no secure evidence that she could use against MJ, and a confrontation might do more harm than good, possibly rebounding on HS's lover in some way. She didn’t have anyone that she trusted enough to seek advice from, and eventually it all comes to disgust her so much that she gives notice, and goes off to work in a psychiatric hospital in Dorchester. 

WILLIS: Ugh, so he effectively got away with it. 

MARLOW: Seems so. 

WILLIS: On that rather chilling note, we’ll have to end, I’m afraid—out of time. Thanks so much, Pam, for sharing some of your sources with us. ‘The Fertile Fact’ will return next month, with a look at the notebooks of Eulalia Merrick, an amateur architectural historian working in Devon in the early nineteenth century.

**Author's Note:**

> Pauline is pretty much an original character, though she is connected to canonical Renault personnel in _Purposes of Love_ and _Return to Night_. A lot of the details of her nursing experience and biography are taken from Renault's own. Mr Stuart's climbing 'accident' deliberately echoes the experience of Neil Langton in _North Face_.


End file.
